Like many others [judging by their rapid selling out] I was inspired by the recent firesale on Nook Simple Touches [hereinafter referred to as Nooks], which were going for £29 in the UK, last month.

Thinking that "for £29 a pop, you can't go wrong", I bought two of these gadgets and have had a month now to evaluate them. My conclusion is that, even for £29 a pop, you most certainly CAN go wrong:

* On arrival, both Nooks revealed themselves to have been built in 2011, so had been sitting on a shelf in a warehouse somewhere for two or more years.

* Far from B&N's claim that the batteries will last for two months with half an hour's reading per day and a similar amount of WiFi use, I have found that on both my Nooks, the battery will run completely flat in about 3 or 4 days –even with WiFi turned off and the Nook being completely unused. That's worse battery life than my bloody iPhone! [Incidentally, both Nooks had vastly different serial numbers, so this is not a case of one bad batch here].

* B&N have completely ignored two polite emails I've sent them throught their support address, enquiring about having the batteries or the Nooks replaced. Their customer service seems non-existent.

If my experience is the norm, rather than an exception, I think it's extremely cynical of B&N to perpetrate what is tantamount to fraud on the buying public. It seems to me that —knowing Li-ion batteries have a shelf life of not much than three years— B&N have cleared out a load of old Nooks with age-degraded batteries at a bargain basement price, without informing customers that the Nook they would receive is effectively no longer fit for purpose.

I wouldn't mind so much if I was only getting three-quarters or even half the claimed battery life, but 4 days equates to a fifteenth of what B&N advertise —and that's with the Nook not even being used, just sitting on standby.

Has anyone else who thought they were snapping up a £29 bargain been similarly disappointed with what they received –or am I just exceptionally unlucky?

B&N has sold a lot of these Nook Touch ereaders recently with the low prices. I have seen no complaints about the battery, either on this forum or on the B&N forum. So perhaps you just have bad luck.
B&N has no e-mail support (just standard replies). You will have to call or chat.

The Nook Touch uses an infrared screen. Anything detected by the infrared beams can trigger the screen. One cause of battery problems mentioned in the past are covers that are just close enough to the screen to prevent the screen from going to energy saving mode.

have you checked your software version and ran a update on these units? I know there were a few battery tweaks a few revisions ago, not sure if that would help - especially if they have been sitting around collecting dust before you purchased them.

I find that the "auto update" has never worked for me, so I do the manual updates myself.

I got a Nook ST a couple of weeks ago and in my rush to have a play with it I just skipped registration and loaded my books, overnight on sleep I lost 16% battery, after a couple of days massive battery loss I reset and registered properly and now I barely use 1% in a day in sleep. Is that what you are doing?

Both Nooks were running outdated firmware. I updated one to the latest when I got it [1,2,1 if I recall] and the other a week or so later. Both showed the same lack of battery life, before and after firmware upgrade.

The registration issue is interesting, as I did bypass registration on both. I intended these as cheap holiday readers I can sideload my existing ePub collection onto and was never going to buy anything from B&N anyway. So that may be the answer.

Has anyone any ideas why bypassing registration would knacker battery life in this way? I could kind of understand it if wifi was on and the Nooks were periodically trying to contact the mothership. But what can be chewing up the volts with wifi off and the Nook in standby?

I too was tempted and bought one and although it was sealed and sold as new, when I opened it, it had several scratches on both sides indicating it was a refurb. I tried to charge it and it wouldn't even charge or turn on. How can they sell these units as "new" when they are refurbs? Needless to say, this baby went back to the store for refund.

Well, by now I guess it's clear that your battery problems are from bypassing the registration. Because the device is not meant to run unregistered there is some process that keeps running until it is registered.
Just register it with an email address. Doesn't even have to be a real one. They don't check. I have set up a BN account that I use exclusively for registering devices that I give away. People over here can't buy from the BN store anyway, and I don't have to put in any credit card details. But, like I said, you don't have to set up an account at all. Just put in an email addy and go!

...Just register it with an email address. Doesn't even have to be a real one...

I thought you needed to enter bank/card payment details as part of the registration process? That's why I wanted to avoid it. If an email address is all you need then problem solved. I'm sure <somebody>@mailinator.com will be delighted to give B&N an outlet for their spam.

The registration issue is interesting, as I did bypass registration on both.

I don't understand this "tin-foil hat" attitude. What's the deal with providing an email address (which doesn't even need to be real) and a name (that doesn't even need to be real) to just register a device? You can then just turn wifi off forever and be done with it.

I don't understand this "tin-foil hat" attitude. What's the deal with providing an email address (which doesn't even need to be real) and a name (that doesn't even need to be real) to just register a device?....

See my previous post. I was under the impression that you needed to provide payment method details in order to register, which is why I didn't want to do it.

As for it being a tinfoil attitude, maybe some of us just like to think that when we buy something it belongs to us and we don't have to allow the original vendor to "keep tabs on us" while we use it. For a slightly more practical justification, I refer you to the celebrated recent case where Amazon remotely wiped a woman's Kindle, without justification or explanation: